Leaving University
Written March 13, 2005

This is not really an opinion column. This is an end but not a conclusion. This is an exercise in moving on.

March is when the questioning begins. Where are you living next year? What are your plans for the summer? Who’s going to take care of your adorable Shetland pony while you’re away on co-op? The Concourse sings with a thousand voices asking the same questions but they all tell us that things are going to be different soon – right after we finish this godforsaken essay blitz. After exams, change is waiting patiently with sharpened teeth.

This year, I’m especially wary of the teeth because, for graduating students, the March questions get a lot more pointy as the end crawls near. Every passing conversation is a reminder that the hedonistic bubble that protected us for four years is about to burst and we are soon be scattered.

Where are you going? What will you do? These inquiries are met with wide smiles and bubbly rants about finally, finally, being done. There are nervous glances and admissions of motivational roadblock. There’s talk of travel, of the infamous victory lap, of desk space in the crooked ladder of the great corporate bureaucracy.

I hear the jokes about how our BA degrees will look great beside an open guitar case full of spare change. I see the frightened bravado of friends who will cross the finish line and stop running because there’s nowhere left to go. I sense apprehension, anticipation and a slow unravelling of the ties that bind us together here at Wilfrid Laurier High.

I walk the hallways of our tiny institution and see the many people who took part in the grand drama, the university mythology that I will always return to. I wonder about those I never met, the faces in my classes who never became more than just faces. My lips stay sealed but the questions are asked nonetheless: Where are you all going after *this*? What stories will you tell? What did this experience mean to you?

I feel inclined to hold on – to grasp at the memories which built me such an effective post-secondary refuge. I want to capture the horrors of the Turret, the crank-call triumphs of Little House A2E, and the hilarious absurdity of the Cord office. Everything is a frantic, ridiculous last-second preparation before getting tossed into the Wave Pool of Real Life that we’ve all heard so much about.

It’s important to take a breath before the plunge, to make sure these closing weeks complete the story the way you want. During a typical four year program, enough crazy stuff will happen to you to fill an entire HBO miniseries. And when you get close to the credits, you’ll want one final, careful look at things before you start a new season. Glance away now and you’ll be missing the best part.

I’m reminded of the lame poems about moving onwards that filled our high school yearbooks, where it was apparently considered witty to rhyme “leaving” with “bereaving.” I laughed then and I laugh now – whoever came up with those literary gems should be set on fire – but somehow I’m still compelled to try and describe the wonderful and terrifying and mystifying sensation of leaving all this behind. Maybe everyone has to deal with the sweeping changes that graduation brings in their own way. I can dig the sappy ending but I hate poetry.

I might have jumped the gun with this one, seeing as we still have muchos class and essays and various other things to wrap up before school is really done. Still, the feeling is looming and I think people should know ahead of time, to get a heads up so they can start to conclude everything that they've started over the past 4 years (or whatever). The worst thing in the world would be to get wrapped up in all this bullshit schoolwork stress right now and not really realize what's going on until exams are done and everyone's gone for good. You'd raise your head from the desk and wonder where it all went and eventually realize that it's never ever coming back.

I'm not really pessimistic about leaving but I can't help but be a little wistful, you know?